The Angry Exile: Appeal.

The Hangman

Into our town the Hangman came,
Smelling of gold and blood and flame.
And he paced our bricks with a diffident air,
And built his frame in the courthouse square.
The scaffold stood by the courthouse side,
Only as wide as the door was wide;
A frame as tall, or little more,
Than the capping sill of the courthouse door.
And we wondered, whenever we had the time,
Who the criminal, what the crime
That the Hangman judged with the yellow twist
of knotted hemp in his busy fist.
And innocent though we were, with dread,
We passed those eyes of buckshot lead --
Till one cried: "Hangman, who is he
For whom you raised the gallows-tree?"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
And he gave us a riddle instead of reply:
"He who serves me best," said he,
"Shall earn the rope of the gallows-tree."
And he stepped down, and laid his hand
On a man who came from another land.
And we breathed again, for another's grief
At the Hangman's hand was our relief
And the gallows-frame on the courthouse lawn
By tomorrow's sun would be struck and gone.
So we gave him way, and no one spoke,
Out of respect for his Hangman's cloak.
The next day's sun looked mildly down
On roof and street in our quiet town,
And stark and black in the morning air
Was the gallows-tree in the courthouse square.
And the Hangman stood at his usual stand
With the yellow hemp in his busy hand;
With his buckshot eye and his jaw like a pike
And his air so knowing and business-like.
And we cried, "Hangman, have you not done
Yesterday, with the foreign one?"
Then we fell silent, and stood amazed,
"Oh, not for him was the gallows raised."
He laughed a laugh as he looked at us:
"Did you think I'd gone to all this fuss
To hang one man? That's a thing I do
To stretch a rope when the rope is new."
Then one cried "Murder!" and one cried "Shame!"
And into our midst the Hangman came
To that man's place. "Do you hold," said he,
"with him that was meant for the gallows-tree?"
And he laid his hand on that one's arm.
And we shrank back in quick alarm!
And we gave him way, and no one spoke
Out of fear of his Hangman's cloak.
That night we saw with dread surprise
The Hangman's scaffold had grown in size.
Fed by the blood beneath the chute,
The gallows-tree had taken root;
Now as wide, or a little more,
Than the steps that led to the courthouse door,
As tall as the writing, or nearly as tall,
Halfway up on the courthouse wall.
The third he took -- we had all heard tell --
Was a usurer, and an infidel.
"What," said the Hangman "have you to do
With the gallows-bound, and he a Jew?"
And we cried out, "Is this one he
Who has served you well and faithfully?"
The Hangman smiled: "It's a clever scheme
to try the strength of the gallows-beam."
The fourth man's dark, accusing song
Had scratched our comfort hard and long;
"And what concern," he gave us back.
"Have you for the doomed -- the doomed and Black?"
The fifth. The sixth. And we cried again,
"Hangman, Hangman, is this the man?"
"It's a trick," he said. "that we hangmen know
For easing the trap when the trap springs slow."
And so we ceased, and asked no more,
As the Hangman tallied his bloody score.
And sun by sun, and night by night,
The gallows grew to monstrous height.
The wings of the scaffold opened wide
Till they covered the square from side to side;
And the monster cross-beam, looking down,
Cast its shadow across the town.
Then through the town the Hangman came,
Through the empty streets, and called my name --
And I looked at the gallows soaring tall,
And thought, "There is no one left at all
For hanging, and so he calls to me
To help pull down the gallows-tree."
So I went out with right good hope
To the Hangman's tree and the Hangman's rope.
He smiled at me as I came down
To the courthouse square through the silent town.
And supple and stretched in his busy hand
Was the yellow twist of the hempen strand.
And he whistled his tune as he tried the trap,
And it sprang down with a ready snap --
And then with a smile of awful command
He laid his hand upon my hand.
"You tricked me. Hangman!," I shouted then,
"That your scaffold was built for other men...
And I no henchman of yours," I cried,
"You lied to me, Hangman. Foully lied!"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
"Lied to you? Tricked you?" he said. "Not I.
For I answered straight and I told you true --
The scaffold was raised for none but you.
For who has served me more faithfully
Then you with your coward's hope?" said he,
"And where are the others who might have stood
Side by your side in the common good?"
"Dead," I whispered. And amiably
"Murdered," the Hangman corrected me:
"First the foreigner, then the Jew...
I did no more than you let me do."
Beneath the beam that blocked the sky
None had stood so alone as I.
The Hangman noosed me, and no voice there
Cried "Stop!" for me in the empty square.

Maurice Ogden

Sunday 3 October 2010

Appeal.

This is an unusual post because I'm going to promote a product for a small company that's about to hit the bricks and hopefully play a small part in them, or at least their product, surviving.

Some reading this might have more than one computer, or perhaps a computer and an iPhone. Others might use different browsers depending on their browsing. For some it might be both. And for all of those people sorting out your bookmarks so they're the same on all machines can be a tedious pain in the arse. For a while now I've been using a browser plug-in by the name of X-Marks, formerly Foxmarks. This little gem does a couple of things besides managing bookmarks but for me it spends much of its time working quietly in the background, rarely making any fuss and keeping our bookmarks synchronised across three machines using two types of browser. Now and again a splosh of colour will appear next to its icon in the toolbar to let me know that it's noticed a new or edited bookmark on the local machine or that it's become aware of one on another synched machine and is now quietly creating duplicates while I'm getting on with whatever I'm doing. It even lets me create profiles so that while the sum total of all bookmarks on all machines is kept on the server only desired bookmark folders are synched on each machine. This way Mrs Exile doesn't have to wade through a massive list of folders and bookmarks relating to my ranting since it's confined to the server and this machine, while in turn I don't have folders of bookmarks that interest only Mrs Exile. All our other bookmarks, the majority of them in fact, are regularly synchronised so we can go straight to each other's computer and find, say, the TV guide or the weather exactly where we're used to finding it on the machine we each use most.

Mac and iPhone users will have read this and thought it sounds a lot like Apple's MobileMe, or at least the synching bit of it. And it is, except for three things:

Xmarks only does bookmark synching, smart searching and browser built in site info (unless something's been added lately that I haven't noticed).
It offers cross browser support, which as far as I know makes it unique.
And, unlike Apple's product, it doesn't cost AU$119 a pop. In fact up 'til now it's been free.

And that's the problem. Xmarks have apparently been providing this for free for several years in the hope that a business model would kind of turn up or that someone else would buy it up and adopt it as part of a range of related services, but unfortunately that hasn't happened and the money has almost run out. On January 10th next year the Xmarks service will be discontinued unless it can find a buyer in the next couple of weeks, and naturally that means it must show that it can pay its way. In turn that means finding around 100,000 customers who are willing to pay US$10-20 a year for the service, and finding them fairly sharpish.

Now if you're an Apple MobileMe user and you really only wanted the bookmarks synching you might well be thinking that saving $80-90 or your rough equivalent would be pretty handy and will hopefully be n your way to the bottom of the post where the links are. Firefox, Chrome and Internet Exploder users will be thinking there are already free synching options for them, and that's true. But they don't have cross-browser support, and if you've ever find yourself looking for something you could have sworn you'd bookmarked in Chrome only to realise it was in Firefox this might interest you. It's not perfect because only four browsers - Firefox, Chrome, Safari and IE - are supported, and slightly annoyingly for me it doesn't support the Windows version of Safari, though I've always had the impression that Xmarks hoped to add support for other browsers and so on in the future. If it survives that might still happen. If not... well, an innovative idea won't make it. Fair enough if there genuinely isn't the demand, but a damn shame if a load of people say, 'Bugger, I'd have paid for that' 24 hours after they shut the door for the last time.

So this is my little bit of free advertising for a product for which I and so far about 16,000 or so other users are prepared to pay the comparatively small cost being asked. If it might interest you have a look at Xmarks website here, read about the features here, the current situation here, and, if you think it's worth paying a few bucks for, pledge your support and your folding here. They're not asking for credit card details now, but they are asking for genuine customers who are willing and able to pay ten to twenty US dollars a year for the Xmarks service. And they need to find them by October 15th.

Declaration: I have absolutely no interest in Xmarks other than being a satisfied customer. Basil Fawlty jokes about having me stuffed will be taken as read.